254. Human Superfund Site

Speaker AThis is Do By Friday, a weekly challenge podcast with Alex Cox and Merlin Mann. This week's challenge, get things done.

AlexYou put my name first. Hello, hello. I wonder if Matt has opened the link.

can i resend the link sure i'd

Merlinmaybe maybe he has a high level of security that deletes things oh you've been using zoom

Alexfor two years this is a different meeting than usual right that's true my messages stents

Merlinworking i don't know okay okay okay go how about go be helpful to our guest

Alexall right i'll be right that's exactly what i was afraid of he has like seven icloud accounts i do not which i just just two just two Matthew, I'm asking you to unmute. Unmute. I'm trying.

You're harsh. Matt, unmute!

MerlinIt's not working. How is Matt going to feel welcome when you're yelling?

AlexI'm not yelling. I'm not yelling.

Speaker AI'm really sorry. I'm really sorry about Alex. It's okay. I live with them. I'm used to it.

MerlinIs it always like this? Is it always so? Are they always operating at such a keyed up level? No.

AlexI would argue that this is lower energy than usual.

MerlinWow.

AlexBut I haven't had my Diet Coke yet.

MerlinOh, boy. How was brain school?

AlexIt was quite good. It was good. Your name was invoked.

MerlinOkay.

AlexWhich was...

MerlinLet's welcome our special guest. I already regret this. And I hope you regret it too, Matt. This was a bad decision.

AlexIt was so weird. Oh, gosh. It's weird being recognized. But I wasn't recognized this time. Someone just, uh, was like, you know, inbox.

I didn't tell you about this, Matt. I'll tell you about it later.

MerlinI feel like I've been, I feel like I've been so clear with you about bringing me news from the outside world. I beg, I beg, I beg, I beg, I beg, I beg.

AlexYou, you, okay. All right. All right. Contradiction.

MerlinYou sent me a picture of you. You sent me a photo. God damn it, Alexandra. You sent me a photograph of you making some kind of face and saying something like, TFW, FW someone mentions in Bug Zero in brain school. What the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Nothing. Do you want me to jump on the call? Start another call. Let's restart the audio hijack. Matt, you want to join us for that one from earlier? Jesus fucking Christ.

Alex, please welcome our special guest. Oh,

AlexToday, our special guest is my spouse, Matthew Cox. Hi, Matthew. How are you doing?

Speaker AHey, I'm awesome. I'm really excited. I don't know why, but thank you for being here.

AlexI don't know why either.

Speaker AI'm so sorry we dragged you into this. Because I'm excited to talk to Merlin. That's why.

MerlinI'm sending you PDFs.

AlexOh, yeah. There's a lot of... Oh, I like this PDF.

MerlinThat's a good one. Yeah, I sent you the PDF that I kind of cut my teeth on with the GTD system, which is, I think, a little slightly fancier, prettier version of the one in the book, which looks like it was done in mech paint.

AlexYeah, it's not great. Matt, I am confused about what you do and do not know about this program. Because if I remember correctly, you didn't know who Merlin Mann was. Oh, my God. Not even as the folders guy.

Speaker AI mean, not until I started dating you like almost a decade ago.

AlexWait a second.

MerlinOkay, now this is getting good.

AlexWait, wait. Did I talk about Merlin Man when we were going out?

MerlinWear this mask. Oh, yeah.

AlexOh, God, that's the worst. Why did I do that?

MerlinInbox Zero. Inbox Zero. Hey, you're Inbox Zero.

Alexwait wait what do you recall from that i i mean i remember you had an android phone and it was very upsetting to me but uh what did i what did i say did i i don't this is very strange

Speaker Ai don't recall i just know that you talked a lot about all your podcast heroes and faves

Alexand merlin was one of them so oh that's terrible this is terrible want to start the call hey Let's restart the call. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Dubai.

MerlinThat's a regretful ding. What have we done to this nice person who mostly exists as some kind of, I don't know, a specter on this program? And so you guys almost did it. You people, you bastards. You almost did an episode together. But is this Matt's first official actual real scheduled appearance on here? Apart from like holiday episodes and stuff?

Speaker AYeah, I've only ever been on holiday episodes.

AlexAnd by on, I think he means taking the microphone to me from me after Fun Alex has very much entered the chat.

MerlinOh, I like Fun Alex.

AlexOh, I do once a year. It's a good time.

MerlinWell, it's important to have self-care.

AlexMm-hmm. Yeah, I love myself a masseuse.

MerlinThis is weird. So now we're – hi, Matt. Thanks for being here. We're doing it at this weird-ass time too, which is also weird. So I've been listening to Elvis Costello and watching the news.

AlexWhy? Don't do that. Why?

MerlinElvis Costello?

AlexNo, the news.

MerlinOh, yeah. Everyone's very upset about everything.

AlexI mean –

MerlinYou know, you know. And so, you know, I feel really embarrassed to be here because, you know, you guys live together and you people, you God damn it, live together. And and I, you know, I'm over here with my diagram in my hand. So, well, the idea was we were we thought we thought it would be funny. So here's what had happened was and you jump in. Anybody jump in any time. But but that means you.

AlexThat means you.

MerlinAnybody.

AlexOh.

MerlinUm, but, um, um, I think, uh, your spouse, Matt came up in the context of, oh, uh, um, well, how did it come up? I think it started with a post-it note. Is that how it started?

AlexI invoked his name negatively when I pointed out that the GTD system was very helpful for me and that it was sometimes frustrating to watch my spouse put uh just i mean it's it's hard to talk about before if you don't know what inbox zero is but let's say our entire apartment in fact no he he is just an inbox to himself and he's got just uh actionable items everywhere and sometimes there's post-its in various places that he's put telling him reminding him to clean

things. There's a calendar on the wall that has a schedule.

MerlinWhich is all totally normal.

AlexYeah, yeah.

MerlinWell, okay, okay. Here's the thing. So sometimes, especially on the weekends, a lot of times, you know, Thursday used to be my Thursday. And now in a way I don't love, sometimes Sunday is my Thursday. And that's the day that I do a lot of my mosquito tasks. I do my puttering and my power puttering. And sometimes I'll just put something on like a TV show, maybe a TV show I've seen, and that'll just run in the background. You know, we save up all the communities, you know, because that's a family thing. But I watched the, I re-watched the, oh, what's it called? The Heaven's Gate several part documentary on HBO.

And, you know, as cults go, I think they were pretty gentle by and large up to the point where they want to cut off your balls. But I had it on the background and I kind of feel right now like I'm the bug-eyed guy who wants to give Matt, you know, some black Nikes and then you just lay down here and I'm going to put a bag on your head.

Speaker AI do not understand any of those references.

MerlinI think it feels like we are trying to bring you in to a, it must feel a little bit like we're trying to drag you in to a bizarre cult experience that I'm guessing, I would love to hear your words on this. I imagine this feels very strange and like we kind of dragged you into this. What's your feeling on all of this stuff?

Speaker AOh no, I'm enjoying it. I'm prepared. I did not peanut butter on the challenge. I'm like, I'm stoked.

AlexOh, shit. I truly didn't know this.

MerlinYou guys should get a smaller apartment so you'll talk.

AlexWell, every time he started talking, save it for the show. Save it for the show. And then I would start talking and he would go, save it for the show. Save it for the show. So basically we haven't talked in one week.

MerlinYou literally saved it for the show. Well, good for both of you.

AlexI know. Lots of discipline. We engage in other activities.

MerlinWell, we can jump straight in. I do feel like, if you don't mind, if you two will allow it, I do have a little bit of follow up and follow on and follow through from our last episode if you'll allow it.

AlexAbsolutely. And I should clarify that we are in separate rooms as much as we can be.

MerlinWhat counts as a room? Is it like a pillow fort? Is it like an... Yes, it is.

Speaker AYes, it is.

MerlinLook at Troy and Op-Ed type situation.

Speaker AI will take a picture.

AlexHe's in a makeshift pillow fort slash black monolith of a cage I set up in our living room. And I'm, because a bedroom doesn't work as a studio.

MerlinYou guys playing Professor Space Time?

Okay, so I just want to say, first of all, Alex, just mostly to your interest, you brought, I think this is you that brought this to the class, was the Square Eat we talked about last week.

AlexI don't recall. It's such a blur. I've watched the videos about a hundred times.

MerlinI forget how it came up, but I don't know. You know what it was? A pal of mine was talking about it on the internet. And so we did a little bit of a dive on Square Eat. I added a camel case to it and it doesn't make me like it anymore but we did talk about this guy who makes 50 gram squares of food in his den that tastes like a vegetable and looks kind of like a cross between an AirPods case and a charcoal briquette except it's nominally made out of food I just want to give you

a quick update, I think they got what we've previously called the Dubai Friday bump because one week later they now have 83 investors on Square Enix, just FYI.

AlexI mean, we have at least 12 listeners, so that's got to be significant.

MerlinIt's got to be some of our people. Maybe they're connecting people with people, some angel investors. They are now, they've seen pledges of 165, at least that's not the time to record this, $165,930 American from 80 investors. So get ready. Burkettes are coming your way.

AlexWhat if, evaluate, Wait, I can't do the math. Whenever we do Shark Tank, Matt does the math.

MerlinOh, my God. I always get it backwards. I always get it backwards. I always think that I'm going to be able – because I remember the tricks they taught us in arithmetic, right? The of means times and per means divide, right? So when you say like dollars per gallon, you know that's going to start with dollars and involve dividing. Right?

AlexI could agree. Yes. Yep.

MerlinWell, no, because like you got some dingling that comes in and goes, hey, sharks, I have a chocolate chip maker that I'm looking for a $50,000 investment in exchange for 5% equity. And I always multiply backwards, which is probably why I should have taken arithmetic in college. Like college arithmetic, like good arithmetic.

AlexThe fact that you call it arithmetic.

MerlinArithmetic is different from math. Arithmetic is a part of math.

AlexMaddie, what is this? What?

Speaker AI don't do math. I don't know.

MerlinI neither. I haven't since 2005. Math is a giant field that could include fractals and Sir Isaac Newton. Arithmetic is the basic operations that you learn in elementary school, I think.

AlexOh. So then technically, I don't know if I've ever taken... So, all right. Hmm.

MerlinThis might be costly and expensive. I might be all cock to the walk and turn out I have it all wrong. All I know is that, you know, Lori already has some previous investments in patented boxes. And so she's patented a lot of boxes. So that is her reason for.

Anyway, so I just wanted to say good, good, good news for Squary. Now, another thing you brought to my attention, because sometimes you text me without context and I just pass it by. Have you shared with your spouse, Matthew, the product called Snactiv that may or may not be real?

AlexI have not.

MerlinNope. Would you consider sharing Snactiv here? Because I can't tell if this is real. This looks like something you made up. It's got dark mode. It's got dark mode finger chopsticks. I find it extremely confusing and it's so your shit that it seems like something you must have hired like Louis Mantia to put together for you.

AlexOh, gosh. I wish. He was busy making his.

MerlinHe made a logo for Todd.

AlexWait, really?

MerlinYeah, he made a Speed 3 logo. But could you please tell the class about Snackdiv? Now, this is our new, what would they call this on, this is like a snack corner or snack paper cuts.

Speaker AAre these like cheater chopsticks? You know as a kid how you would take chopsticks and like tie a hair tie or a rubber band around them to help you use the chopsticks?

MerlinYeah, my kid used to use ones that looked like some kind of a tropical bird. they were connected on one end and it was really more like food tweezers or that kind of thing.

Speaker AYeah, that's what these look like.

MerlinAnd apparently you keep them on your right hand the entire time you're using your PC. I love them so much. This red pepper.

But, you know, maybe they could pivot to spoons, but it looks to me like this is finger tweezers you put between your fingers for the purpose of being able to grab bits of snack while you're using your pc is that is that your sense of this alex

Alexyes it's just listen it's a 14 fingering device you're a fingering device there's many tight there's many times yes

Speaker Athe pictures on the website are priceless i love them but it's the fact that they seem to be kind

Merlinof serious about it. Also, it's just weird because you can see somebody going like, oh, I'm a weirdo. I eat popcorn with a spoon because I'm broken inside. That's a thing that somebody could do, but the fact that this seems to be the primary activity. It's like they were going to say, do you want to do PC games or do you want to browse the phone?

Really, it's more like, should we put on our finger tweezers and then do something in the same room? They're having a lot of fun with it. There are so

Alexmany activities going on that are not the kind of fingering that most people are used to. And I just find it very exciting. Look at him type away.

MerlinAll you got to do is squeeze them together. Is this scissoring? Is that what this is called? Scissoring?

AlexThis is probably the most effective form of scissoring I've seen.

MerlinOkay. Snack scissors. We'll keep an eye on this. What are they asking for this, Alex? You can get dark mode or light mode. Oh, it ships this month and they take Apple Pay.

AlexI did indeed just buy a pair, or rather I did a pre-order of Snacktiv Dark Mode for $14, but then they got me for $4.90 of shipping. If I do my arithmetic here, I believe that's $18.90.

MerlinThat's arithmetic. They're having a lot of fun with it here. You can get a case for it, and you can get a Cheeto Stain Simulator tee for $35. For $35, you can have a jokey shirt that looks like you rubbed your hands on your clothes.

AlexYum, yum, yum. Well, actually, Merlin, I'm glad you're here. Yes, thank you. We do need you for this one. What do you – do you often have a snack that is of, like, the cheesy, dusty variety? Like, you know, I know you're not a big snacker.

MerlinFor practical purposes, I do not snack.

AlexOkay. But you use your hands for something, right?

MerlinYeah, I do use my hands for food. Yeah, or, you know. Well, touch it.

AlexOkay, fine. I can hear Matthew snickering from the other room.

MerlinA lot?

AlexNo.

MerlinOften? Sexy ergonomic slots for the index and middle finger.

Speaker AOh, ew. Oh, boy.

MerlinFlexible rubber ensures comfort fit.

Speaker AWait, does it really say sexy? I don't know. I really don't know enough.

MerlinBut listen, they're having fun with this. God bless them. Flexile rubber ensures comfort fit for users 14+. Is that a dress size or an age? I guess that's probably an age. Maybe it's like COPPA. It's like you have to make sure you don't get a Facebook account or finger scissors.

I'll eat a nut. Sometimes I'll eat a nut. It used to be I can name every kind of nut.

AlexYeah. I can name your nut. Can I just say I hate the fact that anytime I touch a HomePod

Merlinit starts playing something.

AlexI don't touch them anymore.

MerlinI don't mean to touch them, but it takes a little. This is, I'm not going to check the date. Blue Diamond Almonds in the Smokehouse flavor. Now see if I had finger scissors, I wouldn't be making this mess and rubbing it on my Mac Weldon.

AlexOh, all right. So you're not a finger licker. You're a wiper.

MerlinGross.

AlexWait, ew to which, Maddie. I would argue that-

MerlinEverything, the whole thing. Food grade, phthalates free, BPA free. really grippy grips to grab your snacks really hard.

AlexYou're wasting it on your silver underwear shirts. And when you could have the extra smoky barbecue dust in your mouth.

Why not?

Speaker AI mean, I thought you said extra sexy. And I was like, I don't want to put labels on anyone.

MerlinNo, thank you. I think it depends. When I was a younger kid, as opposed to the older kid that I am now, when I was a younger kid, I ate a lot of dusty snacks. My friend John and I were partial to barbecue potato chips. Oh, man. So we'd make our version of like a – we'd make a couch for it.

AlexLike Maddie's in.

MerlinCool. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Now, what's the room? I was trying to make a reference. What's the room that Abed has that's like a holodeck? What's that called? Remember?

AlexOh.

MerlinAnd then eventually, and Britta shows up and she can't believe there's a whole extra room. It's just a group.

AlexIt's an imagitor. Something like that.

MerlinBut we would, let's say on a typical Saturday night, and this happened more than once, it's like I'd be at John's house. John, eventually he had it in television later on, but he also had, he was my nerd friend, who in retrospect, I'm pretty sure, was a little aspy. But he was my very dearest friend as a child. and we spent all of our time together, just did everything together. And I would stay at his house on weekends. Sometimes he'd stay at my house. And what we'd do is for Saturday night CBS TV,

we're ready to tuck in and watch us and Bob Newhart. And we'd set up, we'd get our root beer or our other bottled drinks ready. His family always bought whatever pop was on sale, which I thought was a little unseemly. But we would do that and we would get our potato chips ready and then we would set up the couch. We'd reposition all the cushions and the sheets, get everything the way we wanted, and then create kind of our own Imagitorium. We were kind of our own, Troy and Abed, in a lot of ways. I hope I'm not stealing valor. But we would, yeah, and then we would do that. And then you get the dust all over you.

But, you know, I was tan. I didn't care.

AlexBut, I mean, you don't want to get the Imagitorium dirty.

MerlinYou don't. Exactly. The time platform should be dust free.

AlexMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I'm I that's why I'm a spooner because Matthew doesn't like the licking.

Speaker AIt's the grossest. It's it's one of my pet peeves. Licking your fingers after you eat something is so gross. It's so gross.

MerlinReally interesting. Has that always bothered you, Matt?

Speaker AYeah.

MerlinYeah. What about the smacking after you drink? Do you have a feeling on smacking after you drink?

Speaker AOh, God. Yeah, I do it all the time. And then I hate myself.

MerlinYes. Yes. My my my spouse does it. And it's become like a joke. Sorry, quick reference to a very funny episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Jeff's wife, Susie, does that. And they finally recruit Larry to be the one that confronts her about it. And it drives Jeff crazy. It drives her daughter. Every time she takes a drink, she goes.

My stepfather used to do that. That was the best thing he did of all the things he did, my stepfather. But I'm intrigued by this, Alex, and I like the way you're letting your witch out, as my friend Dennis used to say. I like the way that the witch of snacks for you expresses itself with assistive affordances. I think that's exciting.

AlexI mean, I'm just in a very vulnerable place right now. It's after brain school. My spouse is on a show in which at least 20 people listen to. and you know Maddie you can say literally anything about me right now and I can't do anything why do you do this to yourself

Merlindon't you want boundaries

Alexboundary schmounderies you're adorable

Speaker AI love your hair cut

Alexoh gay no fuck you just go fuck yourself

Speaker Ayou talk about babies

Alexoh good lord oh there's some really good babies in this

Merlinlately I've started talking a lot more like Shirley

Alexoh

Merlinaww I found a super cut of Annie and Shirley going, aw. Do you watch that show, Matt? Is it just Alex and me that like the show Community?

Speaker AI don't understand that reference either.

AlexNo, it's not high enough. Aw. There's some people in my church who might go.

MerlinOh, my God. When they set Abed up, he agrees to set up on a date because he thinks it'll be like a funny comedy trope. And then Brie Larson is there. I was not expecting Brie Larson to be there.

AlexI don't remember. Maddie, are you more familiar with, do you remember that episode?

MerlinNo.

Speaker ABecause you watched till the end. It was rough, yeah.

MerlinOh, does it get rough? We're in season three where they're in the corn right now. They're having a lot of fun. There's a lot of silliness. And the show gives me much to think about.

Speaker AIs it the gas leak season? Is that the one you're in?

MerlinOh, I don't, I don't, I'm at, where am I at? I've seen my kids sometimes, like certain people, cheats on the accord to watch it only together. Not mentioning any names here, but some people cheat on the accord. And so sometimes my kid gets two or three episodes ahead of me. So I came in where Chang is now Kevin, and Kevin has Changnesia.

Speaker Ayeah i think that's the gas leak season which everybody hates okay no spoilers no spoilers

Merlini've been enjoying the show tons more than i expected though really oh well i thought it was i thought i got it and i mean it is it's it revels in its silliness but there's these two paragraphs on the wikipedia page that i keep mentioning to you alex i keep thinking about i keep thinking about the story circle and i keep thinking about you know just the semiotic stuff

Alexand the tropes you know wait so if you've been watching merlin if you've been watching community have you been watching some other dan harman properties no i mean i've seen like three

Merlinepisodes of the back to the future show but that's that's i've only seen a few episodes of that it

Alexseems very funny it does seem very funny uh matthew have you seen some episodes i've watched

Merlinbojack i watched all of bojack so cut me some slack i did i did accede to the demands of the hosted the show and I've watched one of the shows that has to be watched and we'll get to Rick and Morty but you know the thing is like think about this think about like right now on Grey's we're in I want to say season five we're in Izzy's got cancer Meredith is trying on the dress all that stuff and it's the show's already garbage even though George is still there but like think about how you felt the first time you saw like season three maybe of like one of the good seasons of

Grey's before it was hot garbage very good it's so good and then you're like oh oh I wish I could go back and see that for the first time again. So I'm trying to appreciate community because I know there aren't that many extremely good shows that I haven't seen out there, I imagine.

AlexI mean.

MerlinI'm talking a lot this week. I'm sorry. This is a very strange time for me.

AlexIt is. Well, this is like you have silly seasons. I feel like the early afternoons for you are like the beginning of the silly times. I don't know. I don't know your life.

MerlinI've got, something I realized about myself, because this is a terrific opportunity for me to talk over both of you and tell you a little about me, is that I learned a pretty long time ago to honor my energy. And I don't always do it perfectly, but back when I used to be Merlin Mann, one of the things I realized in life was you have to know, honor, and potentially leverage your energy through the whatever cycle. let's say in a given day. And so like, I know like how I am for the first hour I'm nominally

awake. I know how I am for like the next few hours and I know how I get after that. And unfortunately for listeners of the podcast, Reconcilable Differences, I know how I feel at five or 6 PM, which is why that's the very hottest garbage time for me to record. This is just the time of day when I'm usually a little bit more heads down on ADD type stuff. where I've gotten the podcast stuff done. That's a morning thing for me. Right? And so, like, I'm usually in a different mode right now.

AlexMatty, have you taken your afternoon meds, by the way?

Speaker AYeah, I took them early.

AlexOh, good job. Look at you. You're here ahead of me for the day. Matty graduated from brain school a long, long time ago. So he is...

MerlinOh, what was your major, Matt? Do you remember? Meditation. Whoa, really?

AlexWait, you said that like it's a real thing. Is that like what they focused on?

Speaker ADo you really want me to talk about my brain school?

AlexYeah, no, talk about whatever the fuck you want. Yeah.

Speaker AOh, so when I was in brain school, like I was actually an inpatient, intensive inpatient five, six years ago. And there were interns then studying mental health. Were they hot?

No, they were not hot. It was not Grey's Anatomy.

MerlinOh, Gilbert, you are a caution. Strap me down. Strap me down, Gilbert. I'm a danger to myself and others, especially you. Oh, Gilbert. You're so gentle. You're too gentle, Gilbert.

I'm so confused.

AlexJoin the club. Welcome.

MerlinWas it a mindfulness type thing? Was it like a being in the moment type thing?

Speaker AOh, yeah. But actually, the best part of brain school was that, not to brag, but because I had such a good understanding of my mental illness, they had me, they did a dissertation on me. And at the end of my stay in brain school, they had me like stand up and explain the history of my family's mental illness. And that was actually kind of cool.

MerlinOh, my. Really? Like Young Frankenstein or like Clockwork Orange? Whoa. That's wild.

Speaker AIt was fun. I had a good time.

AlexThat's all you always want. Your doctor's going, so you're an interesting use case.

MerlinNow it's on YouTube. Examine how the subject has become very attached to the intern known as Gilbert. No one knows why.

Alex and I, I think, are Alex, who either reads or pretends to read a lot faster than me. Alex and I, I think, are both reading the same book right now. which apparently is very popular and has been around for a while. And it's called The Body Keeps the Score.

AlexMm-hmm. It's very, oh, I, yeah, the, I'm really enjoying the, not the Ezra Klein show, but the Ezra Klein RSS feed to his podcast because he has very interesting guests on, but he talks over them.

MerlinHe does. He makes it easy for you to realize something interesting to know about without having to hear him speak 51% of the time. But what got me in this book, and so Matt, forgive me if I'm telling you something you know, but this is a guy who's been studying trauma, PTSD, and his general thesis is that trauma is something that gets imprinted on the brain, the mind, and the body. There are physical effects of trauma, and a couple super interesting spoilers. The big spoiler for, I think, both Alex and me is

because of the way our brain operates, it will try to cover up or make you forget the trauma that happened to you. And that makes you sort of fit in better. Like, have you ever noticed that people who have gone through abuse and trauma still find some way so often to try and like salvage a relationship with the person who was supposed to take care of them? Whether that's a parent or a, you know, a partner or an uncle or whatever. But a boss.

And he does keep dropping these stats that just break your heart about purported numbers of terrible things that happen to people. But number one, I think Alex, you said as much fascinated by that idea of like our brain is, yeah, perhaps trying to protect us from this trauma. But it's also trying to make sure that we can still be in the tribe. Because, you know, this goes way back. You would go to a cop or a teacher in the 40s and say, my uncle's getting a little familiar with me.

And they'd be like, well, don't rock the boat. And anyway, there's that. But that's, I mean, that's so much. I don't mean to be glib. That's a huge realization for me. And what was the other thing? It was this idea that the result of trauma, and by the way, apparently, according to me and according to my shrink, who I asked about this literally last Friday, I was admitting my shame that I'm stealing valor by wondering if I have something like whispers quietly PTSD, because that would sure explain a lot about why I overreact much longer and later than I should to things that aren't happening.

But his thing is like, look, the joy, the joy in life is being able to be in the moment. It's being able to like get to enjoy what's happening right now. and that trauma causes you, I mean, like unconsciously, you don't know you're doing this, but that trauma causes you to like sort of never let go of the past and to sort of reject the future. And obviously he has ample examples of like Vietnam vets and some of their stories are just unbearable

what these people have been through. But I don't know. I just, I wouldn't have mentioned that because I needed to hear that in the same way that I need to be reminded about mindfulness in general. the idea that like if i keep babying my pseudo traumas like i can't be in the moment

Alexwell that got real fast well no like the the other day i i forget even what i was maddie what was i oh let's not let's not make it sad but he was like wait do you do you not talk about this because it feels like it does it feels like after you've read stories about I mean for my parents it was like Vietnam and for me it was like 9-11. It's like I wasn't 9-11 so everything should be fine.

And there's I think it's at the very oh yes it's the very

Merlinbeginning. Like your dad comes back from Vietnam. He's freaked out. Then your mom becomes fucked up because of how he's acting and maybe she's depressed and drinks and then that affects you and you end up passing it along to all the people you care about because anybody who's there that has a role to protect, take care of another person begins introducing doubt about whether they can be safe. And that was a head blowing off emoji moment for me is like, oh, I want this person to protect me and I want to protect them.

And like if I feel like they're vulnerable, yeah, that makes me vulnerable. And the whole thing's just a shit show, right? Is that the thing?

AlexOh, yeah. Oh, who is it? Oh, here we go. jessica stern uh says some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative mine had many stops and starts that's what trauma does it interrupts the plot it just happens and then life goes on no one prepares you for it and maddie i don't want to steal valor valor from you but what have you always said about trauma and progress uh progress isn't linear yeah well where did you get that from it's so good it's so smart progress isn't linear yeah therapy i mean years of

therapy oh you actually talk to your therapist what does that what does that mean what does that

Speaker Amean to you uh it means you know like you can take two steps forward and one step back but that

Alexdoesn't mean that you're not getting better he i mean the big like light bulb moment for me was that you just like with with trauma just any sort of stressors can start and stop at any time and And we make fun of the word triggers because society has made like triggers a joke, which is why like even mental health professionals are trying to like move away from it.

And but like it's so our minds are really good at just putting pause on a lot of stressful things until it isn't. And that's when the starting happens up instead of the stopping. and it doesn't even need to be, you know, 9-11 or Vietnam. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm trying to think of—

MerlinThis list dovetails with another thing I read this week, and this is in the UK in the Telegraph. It's called The Hidden Micro-Stresses, Ruling Your Life and How to Stop Them. And this person is just saying stuff like— well, I mean, the Nutgraph in some ways is when they say, hey, you know, one thing a lot of clinicians realized through the pandemic is that people could be pretty okay at handling the quote unquote big stuff, like the big life stuff, the big job stuff, the little stuff. But that, let's see, she was drawn to the idea of writing

her book because of ability to cope with the minor, but maddening things happening in her life. I quote, I was doing 1000 things at once, but getting frustrated or irritated in ways that were undermining me. Taking each issue in isolation helped to gain some perspective. Quote, to the outside world, they may seem trivial. And if they bother you, people might think you've got anger issues. But it's actually just the accumulation of all these micro stressors finally taking their toll. The idea being that like, oh, people will give you sympathy if they think you deserve it about a big thing. But Alex, how often do you in particular find yourself rejecting your own feelings about something because you think you're not worthy of being taken seriously about something that's bugging you?

Speaker AAll the time. They do it all the time. Shut up.

MerlinAnd I do too. I think we all do it because we're like, oh my God, I've got all my limbs and I like my family. And like I'm not going through all the things that so many people in the world are going through, which now has made me into this machine that rejects my own experience because I'm afraid someone might think I'm fancy.

AlexWell, I've been thinking a lot about masculinity, too, and how so much of toxic masculinity is just not allowing yourself to have a feeling. Like road rage. You don't it's like, oh, God, you're someone could have been with adult then like someone could have just been bullying you and like your your boss at work or your wife was kind of mean to you this morning and your kids were screaming.

And it's like, oh, yeah, those are all regular dad things.

MerlinAnd then like things that are related to the rage that the Dutch guy keeps talking about in his book. Right. Like how did this person who's so kind all the time suddenly have this blind rage about something that seems so trivial? Why does everybody keep punching the wall in our lobby?

AlexYeah. I don't know. Everyone should go to therapy. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. What a bummer.

Speaker AYeah. Well, speaking of self-help.

AlexWant to start the show? Maddie, so far, how is this show different than... You seem very apprehensive. Does this... I don't know. The edit doesn't typically differ a ton from what the actual hashtag content is.

Speaker AI just don't want to talk over everybody. No, I do that. That's me. I do that. I'm sorry.

AlexNo. No, no, no.

Speaker ANo, I want to be polite.

AlexOh. Talk about toxic masculinity. Whip it out. Come on.

Speaker AOkay.

AlexGet those fingering sticks. All right. Oh, gosh. Diggity-dug. This week's challenge was to get things done, and it was, like we mentioned, spurred on, because I just want to help you. I want you to have a mind like water, as David Allen Co. likes to say.

Speaker ABecause you are so organized.

AlexOkay. Like Mr. David Allen Co. Boxes for Demon Dogs, brought to you by Alex. there's a difference between being neat and being organized and i would argue that i'm very

Merlinorganized but not even a little bit neat oh ouch that's so fucking true oh my god oh my god our our we call it the lounge but our our family room living room whatever you want to call it It's just, it's such a surfeit of slightly organized things. Oh my God. Why do I have so many USB-C cables all over the place? Alex, that's a good breakthrough. What did you say? Neat versus organized?

AlexYeah, yeah. Because, I mean, you can have something look pretty, but not know where the pretty stuff should actually go at the end of the day or how to use it.

MerlinOh, I live with that. And she lives with me. Oof.

AlexI mean, see every Apple store since, like, when did Coach Lady happen? I don't know.

MerlinCoach Lady. Talking about Friday Night Lights? Coach Lady.

AlexNo, didn't the CEO of the, is it Coach? Oh, I see.

MerlinThe purse lady. Hannah Arendt. No. What's her name? No. Hannah Waddingham. Her name is, I know who you're talking about, Store Lady. Yeah. She was at Burberry. Was she a Burberry?

AlexYes. Thank you. Yes. It was Blubbery and not Coach. Coach is Coach products.

MerlinMatt, Apple hired somebody to work on their retail stuff who had worked for the English Burberry high-end stores, I believe. Was that the idea, Alex?

AlexYou know the plaid things that your grandmother-in-law wears?

MerlinYour grandmother-in-law.

Speaker AYeah, she's a chaff.

MerlinLives in London.

Speaker AI have no idea what we're talking about. Absolutely none.

MerlinShe's always punching people for YouTube. Yeah, typical chav.

AlexBrad Burry.

MerlinAsbo, they call it an asbo.

AlexBrad Burry. Brad Burry, Stephen Burry.

MerlinOkay, so to get to particulars, here's the thing. May I have a idea of the witness?

AlexPlease.

MerlinOkay. So you've been to brain school. You've done different things. You're surrounded by very good dogs. Um, outside of a clinical setting or similar, what is your, well, it's, it's all, it's printed right on the tin. What's your background with self-help? Have you ever been attracted to reading a book to try and improve a perceived situation in your life, Matt? Absolutely not. No. I knew it. I just knew it. Good for you.

They're mostly garbage, really. I mean, one reason I like this Trauma Man's book, the Dutch Trauma Man, one reason I like his book so much is it's just so lucidly written and so clearly written. And usually I want to skip over the entire prologue intro, all that stuff, because you could tell it's the beginning of so much blah, blah. and you know the rule of thumb with a lot of this stuff is any self-help book you can tear it in half and just start reading from the halfway point because it's just got so much bs one reason i

like that guy's book because i feel like he's he is a very clear uh and lucid writer not emotionless not clinical but but like when you're dealing with stuff like that as opposed to like the like you know i don't want to go single anybody out but there's a lot of self-help books that could be a pamphlet, you know? And I think a lot of them are garbage. You know, the first three pages

Alexof the checklist manifesto are crazy. They just kind of establish like, here's what it is. Make

Speaker Aa checklist. See you later. Wait, have you read a lot of self-help books, Merlin? Yeah, I was raised

Merlinby a single mom, mostly, who was in real estate. And she had a fair number of the kinds of self-help books you'd see in the 70s that are for people who do sales. And so stuff like, it could be stuff like from our more religious background, like a Norman Vincent Peale type thing or like a power of positive thinking. I don't think she had Dale Carnegie. She really liked this guy. I've actually been to a seminar from this very famous sales guy named Zig Ziglar.

You could tell that just sounds like a man who was born in a plaid suit. Zig Ziglar, he's the guy who invented the round to it. Got to get around to it. And he's very big in like sales stuff, positive thinking, all that kind of stuff. A lot of it is really in some ways closer to the secret than what I would consider like the usual sort of help, help. You know, here's a pink book for women kind of route. But no, I've liked things like that. I dabbled in self-hypnosis as a teenager. I dabbled in reading that. And then I think Alex has actually heard this.

I got a cassette of self-hypnosis when I was in high school that I found extremely helpful. And to this day, I still listen to stuff like that. As far as like, yeah, I mean, I've been pretty attracted to that. And I love stuff like tips and tricks books, like any kind of a book that's got like, hey, here's how to do stuff. Like I loved a book in college called Rules of Thumb. That was just all like, you know, just little like two sentence things for helping like heuristics for life.

But by the time self-help was becoming like a huge thing for normal people in the 80s and 90s, like I just it's pretty thin gruel, a lot of it. So, yeah, I'd been somewhat attracted to it, but I was almost always disappointed by how much you needed to pretend to be somebody else in order to follow the dictates of this particular bestselling author. I found it very off-putting and unsustainable, mostly.

AlexI genuinely don't know this. How did you come across getting things done?

MerlinI came across getting things done from a couple. I'd heard of – so just the story that's the twice told, thousand times told story is that I was mostly doing freelance project management at the time with the pretty anemic tools of the web and desktop stuff at the time. combined with my own admittedly poor skills at organization and management.

So like, I mean, the thing is, back in the day before we had web developers, you know, or before we had like, you know, people who would just work on MySQL, like you used to have a role that was called a webmaster and a webmaster was just somebody who did all the web stuff. Like you did the quote unquote web design, you did the production, you might've done some CGI stuff. But you would be the person who did the web stuff, and it was frequently one person. And having that kind of job has built into it a certain amount of project management. So when I had my .com job as nominally a web designer, or as we called it back then, a web producer, there was an element of project management to what I did.

And after the bust, when I was working freelance in the early 2000s, I was doing some design, not really hardly any development, just some basic cold fusion. But I started to realize I was very interested in project management because I wasn't good at it. But it was weird. That's what I was able to get jobs doing. And it's just really, really difficult.

AlexWait, how? Listen, I've stalked you for like 15 years and I've never heard this.

Speaker AVery true.

AlexCan confirm.

MerlinI mean, like, basically, I mean, this could easily sound a lot more grandiose in my telling than it is. But I worked with a handful of people that I was mostly friends with in San Francisco or became friends with. And so I would work on project management for them. And the kind of very, I don't know, I don't know what you call it, but I was in some ways a glorified, we don't say secretary anymore. But a lot of what I did was just kind of keeping the wheels greased, making sure the budget stuff was, you know, any kind of money stuff was sort of dealt with.

I mean, I'm not a money person, but like making sure that we had crossed the T's and dotted the I's on stuff based on commitments. Because, you know, if people are being honest and they're usually not, an astonishing amount of projects in the world begin with usually a deadline, often a budget. And then you try to work in your scale and scope and quality and all that stuff around a deadline. I mean, look what just happened in the country of Afghanistan.

Like when you start with a deadline and try to back solve for what it is that you're doing, it rarely turns out great. You see also Project Management Triangle. I'll put that in notes. But yeah, a lot of what I did was pretty perfunctory. But to answer your question, though, by 2003, I had heard about this book from a couple people. I want to say specifically I'd heard about it in relations to Danny O'Brien and Lifehack stuff, probably like via Cory Doctro.

But I'd heard about getting things done. And I think it was specifically maybe somebody I was working with here in town who said, You should check out this book. It might really be useful to you. And I think I can, just knowing how I am, I can guess that I was probably extremely reluctant QED because most self-help stuff is garbage and it's unsustainable and it's unrealistic and it's a lie, a lot of it. A lot of it is about so much self-help stuff is really more about, in my opinion, so much

self-help stuff. We might have talked about this here. I forget where I talked about this with somebody, maybe Syracuse, but it's so related to stuff like Inbox Zero. I mean, there are people who read a self-help book and because they want to get better as a person. And there are other people who read a self-help book because they think other people need to be better. And they can just sit and kind of nod sagely without changing anything about what they do. So, I mean, I, you know, read an okay amount of that. It's just that getting things done, like from the beginning, from the time I cracked it open, really made, even before I dived into

the process of doing, getting things done, it just seemed so remarkably, like incontrovertibly sensible and doable in a way that once I did start doing it, it was a little like a cult in the sense of like, my God, like I said last week, Alex, like why would you do this any other way? Like, if you have to be told, as I had to be told, well, a project is a desirable outcome that then consists of physical action steps. Well, thanks, genius. That helps a lot. Like, that would have, you know, what would you get that from?

Like, Leviticus? Well, no. Here's the thing. How often? Again, see, also Afghanistan. Have you really established what the desirable outcome is, what the rules are for getting there, what the constraints are, and how many people today, I think this is a very big appeal of GCD for everybody. How many people are working on one project with one goal, with one boss?

Relatively few, and increasingly fewer over time. Most of us are dealing with, think about being freelance, but even thinking about all the times we've had to pick up extra work along the way. You have multiple, if not bosses, at least points of contact who have expectations. People who are not canceling stuff to have meetings about how you're doing. You have to manage all of that basic knowledge work. It's just that it's to the 10th power happening in the 90s and 2000s. Increasingly, you are really on your own to

figure this stuff out. If you have the liabilities of being somebody who procrastinates or somebody with ADHD or somebody with poor self-esteem or weak organizational skills, those tools are just utterly lacking. We all just kind of sleepwalk around trying not to disappoint people. and so when I first read GTD it immediately landed with me as being something that seemed incredibly sensible and then that became sort of my job as I tried to be the Milton to

David Allen's God I guess is to like justify the ways of David to men and say like well how would you adapt this to being a geek and that's I think you know kind of where things went but yeah

AlexI'm curious for Matt.

MerlinDoes that answer your question, Alex?

AlexWell, it does, because I just still think, as I, you know, listened to Getting Things Done Fast and rereading... Faster! Get Things Done Faster! Do it faster! My God, double speed, double speed.

And just, we watched a lot of old 47 Folders talks this week. and I mean I don't it's great GTD awesome I crack uh see it does sound like a cult when I say it practice it weekly ah oh god but I don't think uh it would have appealed to me whatsoever if it had not been from that geek perspective and not just because it was like yay macbooks

which of course that appealed to me but uh very little of the actual like oh gee david allen stuff recognizes different vectors of the world and you know hash i mean like hashtag privilege aside it's really glossed over like if you think about it a while what do you what do you mean because i

MerlinI feel like even I didn't listen to the whole 195 CD set, but I think the very first chapter on the very first disc is called something like after they introduce him and play the saxophones. Something like your whole life is important. And boy, that became a real tentpole for me is that like we used to live in this world where there's work over here and there's life over here. And it's considered pretty unsavory if you allow those to mix. and like today I think anybody who's being honest with themselves like if you if you think you can

just go into work mode and not have any quote-unquote life mode going on I sure hope you're not my dad like whoa like that wow you must suck like how do you not see all of that as being related and you know even in an age before we became our jobs or whatever right um and I know some people don't believe that but I came up at a time when you were really encouraged to believe that what you did for a living was your main, your calling card in life. Like it instantly told people your status.

AlexMm-hmm. And I very, that's a great point that he makes and he always does the thing of like, you can do this with, you know, if you're a C-level executive at your company all the way down to like what you have for dinner, which, and it all makes sense. But when he talks about sacrifice, I mean, we might be getting ahead of ourselves, but like talking about the decisions you make that lead to sacrifice of like, OK, what are you really going to focus on and what are your priorities?

It's he never really talks about the consequences of that and the power to make those choices.

MerlinThat it does sort of assume a certain amount of pounds on something that like you're allowed to make those. Well, I mean, because like implicit in what he says and he talks about Peter Drucker.

Alexlike he really's got a boner from Peter Drucker this is I mean who that's probably where I picked

Merlinit up but but the but the temp what she what I feel like what if you only need to know one thing about Peter Drucker it's that he I think he coined the term knowledge worker but his key insight that I think we ignore at our peril is that and David really gets into this with the whole widget cranking thing which I think he does a really great job with is that Peter Drucker said like your job is figuring out what your job is like you got to do your job but you're also constantly having to figure out what your job is. And my little slight footnote to that would be like, well, yeah, but you also have to manage all the relationships around all the people who are

figuring out what their job is. And it's nonstop. And whether that's your kid, your parents, your partner, that's not just your quote unquote boss. I mean, I used to talk about this in those dumb talks I would do. I'd put up that dumb diagram of my grandfather and his job at Cincinnati gas and electric where it's like you know he only ever had one boss at a time really or like a hierarchy of bosses but he didn't my grandfather who worked for cincinnati gas and electric for over 30 years he never had to deal with the concept of a dotted line on an org chart and

the dotted line is just murder like you suddenly get put like my wife gets put on these committees where now she's like which is cool because like that's how you move up in management and she's a manager, but like, she'll just be on this committee. And like now suddenly she's interfacing with all these other people and doing a totally different kind of thing. And all the time she's working on that. This is my, my telling, not hers. She's not working on this thing over here. She's not dealing with the, her, her employee who just had a baby early yesterday. Like she's, she's got to manage all of that inside of this giant organization. And there's just, there's so little sympathy

for how difficult that is to do that I think we're ashamed to even admit how difficult and

Alexcomplicated that is because it makes us look weak. Yeah. And, uh, and especially like, uh, women, like, and that's why I use sometimes use a deep voice on the phone. And sometimes I use a really high squeaky voice on the phone because you not, it's not just figuring out your job and then uh people other folks jobs but what other people think your job is and their expectations of you like i've never had just one boss example i used to use i'm sorry maddie this gets me very

Merlinexcited i don't get to talk about this bullshit anymore but like think of it this way like if you work in an office and like you're you know i i do end up talking about women in the office a lot because hot um no but like if you like let's say you're somebody of authority in the office who wears a mid-height heel and has like a nice briefcase and stuff. And like if somebody comes and like asks you to like, I know this is extreme, but we all deal with this. Like sometimes, and I think we've all dealt with this with not very good bosses, people just start screaming

or the equivalent of screaming until somebody responds. And so like that could be about who left the coffee pot on. That could be about why you can't find the Henderson report. And it could be why the printer's not working. And like if somebody doesn't know what your job is and they ask you to – hypothetically, if they ask you to fix the printer, well, I mean, do you have the stones to say it's not my job to fix the printer? Well, okay, this person doesn't know me or my role well enough to realize what a dumb thing they just asked.

But guess what? In a minute, I'm going to have two problems. because now I've got a boss with a broken printer and I seem uncollegial. So of course I'm going to put on my heels and go fix the printer. Like somebody's got to fix the printer. Like what am I going to say to this person who's never interacted with me before? I say, well, go contact the help desk. Wow, okay, I'll remember that. You know, I admit that's extreme, but I think we've all had to deal with that.

AlexIt's not, though. Not even like one of my favorite examples of this is how I had to entertain Marianne Williamson and unclog a toilet in the same 30 minutes.

MerlinHow could you tell which is which?

AlexYeah.

Speaker AYou're just a nice little lady.

MerlinNo, I love her. She's great.

AlexAlthough I did get in trouble for bringing her a water bottle. Not through her. Through her aides. And they're like, excuse me, she can't have plastic water on stage because, you know, sustainability is her thing. And then I had to go find a mason jar to pour the water into.

MerlinYou know somebody's peed in that jar. You just need it. I probably peed in that jar, if I'm being honest.

AlexSo many jars.

MerlinMatchy, you come into this. You did not peanut butter. You did the homework. You don't have a huge background with self-help. How did this arrive on your plate? And give us, if you're comfortable, give us your impressions about what you've digested and how you generally feel about it.

Speaker AWell, it came on my plate because Alex has been talking about it for years and wanting me to get organized that way.

MerlinSo you finally had to say, Alex, please quit coming on the plates. Dougie's going to be very upset.

Alexwhat was that Matthew no continue

Speaker AAlex has always been like this is the way you need to do stuff to get organized and they are right in that I have post-it notes and lists and marker boards with lists and iPhone notes with lists everywhere which makes sense to me and I can keep it organized. But when you share a life with someone and need to stay organized with them, it can drive them crazy.

So that's understandable.

MerlinWe all have different tolerances for different kinds of stuff, whether it's a tolerance for clutter or a tolerance for a seeming disorganization. But I think this is not anything I would say on main, but like you know people like me who are like here i shove a book in your hands it's like well there's a couple ways we could do this one is i force a book in your hand and make you read it because of how i think you should change or the other one is maybe i could learn to be less bothered by you having a system or a non-system lack of a system that doesn't bother you it's

just the people like alex and me are just like what do you mean i didn't know this is an option I could be less bothered by something

Speaker Athey haven't like forced it upon me it's been like a slow like a slow con almost long con the long con bringing it up when we first started dating and just peppering it in more and more the longer we've been together right

Alexwe're doing a podcast together you should put everything in this space and let's uh oh here here are some note cards oh look at this move everything into obsidian

Merlinwhatever that is so did this arrive to you as this book or did this primarily arrive to you as this

Speaker A189 cd set it it arrived to me as the short uh youtube talks actually which are not good

Merlinat all no they're very bad what what are i mean what are those like official gtv videos

Alexyeah they're the ted talks that he's given and it's like the first five minutes is great and then he gets into the jargon that i was even like wait is this in the book and like had to do a search

Merlinfor it like i i do not recommend it you can understand why i mean the the component of that kind of stuff that and i don't say this i'm not saying this i don't mean to sound unkind but like you know you gotta hustle like this is how growth works you know is that you've got to find people who haven't bought your thing and get them to buy your thing. And the kind of thing is kind of like how I feel when I'm like, I don't want to sound like that particular 55-year-old man, but like, dude, I'm paying for HBO Max. Like, why do you keep showing me an ad for something that I've already watched

before I get to watch White Lotus or whatever? It's like, you know, that is a kind of noisome. If I'm in entertainment mode, I'm really not in listening to pitches. mode. And the kind of stuff that goes into, and again, it sounds mean, but I don't mean it that way. I just, I can't believe how much stuff you see is really just clickbait in the world. Is it really a bummer where it's like, like I saw today on one of those bullshit Apple sites where it's like, these are the eight states that are going to like let you put your driver's license into

Apple wallet. It's like, no, it's not. It's a headline about that. You want me to go click another thing? Like everybody always wants me to be doing something different than what I'm here to do. And in the case of something like the sales pitch for GTD, I think anybody in marketing could tell you the sales pitch for GTD is and probably should be different from the actual pedagogy of here's GTD, here's why it makes sense, here's how to implement it. You know, you've got to like tickle their buying bone. Does it suffer from that or am I getting it wrong? Yeah, I think it's very

Alexmuch and it was like one of the old school ted talks before it was like tedx it did feel kind of like the first five minute or like 15 minutes was like here's the thing i do and the second 15 was like here are the words that i will tell you if you hire me which yeah you're right that's it that's what it's for that that is what it's for but that's why it wasn't david allen that brought me to the GTD stuff. In fact, I don't even think I knew it was called

GTD. I was just like, oh, this site with

Merlinthis... I just slapped my own label on it. I basically had this mason jar of urine that I put my label on. Check it out. It's good.

AlexWell, I mean, I as a child could not afford a Palm Pilot and I thought it was really funny that some guy put some staple or excuse me a binder clip and some note cards together and i mean you always see i'm getting getting out of myself but i always really liked the sort of disclaimer of like you might say that that's fine for a merlin man but and you just put it in you contextualize it much better in a in a

Merlinmore down-to-earth way it's also that it's it's also that i mean like if you get into the david stuff and this really comes across i think a little bit in that in those cds and i don't know you i mean he's not sandbagging when he says stuff like you know i'm the laziest person you've ever met um because i think that that's there's something some truth to that i mean the truth is i am actually i'm way lazier than david allen but like there's this thing i used to think sometimes that is difficult to say with any nuance or credibility but like uh there's a part of me

that thinks never take productivity advice from people who don't have problems oh god yeah that's like going to a therapist who doesn't go to therapy well like and that's such a tentpole of a lot of the self-help stuff and i'm not going to name names or talk about breakdancing in indonesia but there are a lot of people out there and their whole bit is pitching themselves as this person who's not only figured out how to dick life, but like how to even like cut corners on life. And like, why are you such a sucker for having such a stick up your ass

about how life works? And I'm much more like, I'm more like an attractive nuisance. I'm a public disaster. I'm like a human super fun site. I have so much fucked up stuff about how my life and my brain are that like I would like to think in a way that lets me sleep at night, that that actually makes me better suited for talking to somebody who's tired of being told just to do the thing that's in the book. So like, that's why, I mean, I tend to want to interrogate the stuff that's more difficult.

Like, like he makes a really good point of saying like, well, here's this workflow. And like, you can figure out like, you know how to do your job. You just need to get this stuff in line. And like, yeah, but yeah, but it's still really hard to do the stuff that I don't want to do. And like, so for me, that become that for years, that became the breakthrough of, oh, The reason I'm not doing this is I'm never going to do this. How dare you? But you're supposed to do that. It's like, no, I could. But the thing is, adding more lies to my life is not making me happier. What about some kind of a radical internal personal candor or honesty that says, like, I can no longer perform this version of myself that keeps other people from hating me?

And trying to do that is not making anybody's world better. at best I'm minimizing the amount of friction I have with people I don't care about but what do I have to do to focus on the shit that really fucking matters push the other stuff away aggressively and then on top of it all if I'm lucky twice a year not feel like a dick for doing that because there's so many people and here I'll go into cold hold and call field mode here there's so many people who are sleepwalking through their fucking life thinking it's mostly about managing

the way it looks to other people. And they are profoundly unhappy. They are profoundly unproductive. And they don't have the temerity to believe that they could choose to focus on stuff that actually improves the lives of themselves and the people around them. And there's no book that can make you care. I'm sorry. I know I've been saying that for all 17 years, but no book can make you care. No diagram can make you care. You cannot manufacture care. You can manufacture the appearance of caring about care, but you can't make somebody think

their life is valuable. And they will continue to cut muscle every chance they get if they think it's going to make some dipshit think that they're not bad. So that's why, like, to me to have a praxis or, I don't know, one of those max words, like praxis or codec or whatever, to have some kind of a system for going, you know what? In my case, there's not 49 things I could do with an email, there's a couple things I can do with an email. One of those things is delete it. Another thing is do something about it. But just because something lands

in my world does not make me obligated to pretend to care about it and to actually value the things that must stay alive. I have to very aggressively develop a system for letting me push away the stuff that's not that valuable stuff. And if anybody thinks they can live a fulfilling life with anything different, I mean, congratulations. I can't.

AlexMerlin, don't listen to this. Maddie, you and I have talked about how when I was like, fuck all of this, and I left normal college and went to art school. It was like one of those things where, oh, God, I can't. do you remember me telling you about the like uh maybe a javascript plugin where i would like it would track whenever i uh changed the due date of anything that i had in i it might have been omni focus it was whatever um like app hotness was around at the time and there were

I was I became that person who started making lists of stuff that I had done but not on my to-do list and that sort of sense of this this guy talking about how there's no way like you are not lying to other people even worse you were you are lying to yourself. So like, yes, I really, really wanted to print out the I said I wanted to print out those flyers and host that peer ministry meeting. But not really. I just wanted to make documentaries and talk about movies on podcasts. And I mean, like, I don't know when I think I talked to you about this when you were writing like the gay Buffy paper.

Speaker Ai didn't get how you got from crossing off lists of things you hadn't done to the gay buffy paper no but i didn't i didn't follow that transition once you once you matt once you really study

Merlinproductivity you'll discover that there are wormholes that you can pass through to get you

Speaker Afrom one topic to another that's how alex and i get the big bucks see i wish i could see there's part of me that wishes I could GTD with my life but I just don't think that's the way my brain works unfortunately like I I don't know I have a system and I am very stubborn in in my real life all the time and uh I like to I shut up uh and and I like to stick to my messy systems but

I'm hoping to at least start applying it to podcasting because I feel like if I apply it to work, that'll give me some semblance of organization. But Alex, I have no idea what you're talking about other than you used to write lists all over post-it notes in college and stick them all over your dorm and none of them made any sense.

AlexWell, I should say those were my...

Speaker AGraphophilia.

AlexThose were my minds.

Speaker AScribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble, scribble.

AlexEvery, like, a couple months or so, I would just do, you know, do a big review and just write down literally everything. And I still don't know what Zetel, Zetel, Zetel, Kalsen, or whatever the fuck that is. But I would.

MerlinAlex is talking about one personal knowledge management system.

Alexthe is a pkm pkm uh but i would just um i mean he talks about this in the um getting things done fast see his seminar that i i genuinely really really liked and got more out of it than i thought i would um but you know just writing everything down for hours and then finding out which were projects and which were tasks and i it it does matthew would walk in and be like

someone did not sleep last night and it would be true and but would it be a marker for a certain kind of mania it might have been uh hey you take take your meds this morning uh how you how you doing there buddy but and then though like cleaning off that wall and only having a few post-its remain and realizing like all right this is the shit that i'm actually gonna do for these actual few classes for for example like you so maddie you had a bunch of ideas

for a paper paper for gay history class where we met see look at it's our cute uh meet cute what um and you had all of these like great ideas and i'm like well but you just want to talk about the uh i don't know what did you want to talk about it was really good i remember i edited the shit out of it and got mad at me because i got all bitchy about expert commas well it was

Speaker Aabout bi erasure but it was also about you know uh lesbian representation and how they always got

Alexkilled off the right right and you wanted to talk about all of the uh the the things in merlin hasn't seen buffy but uh wait what circle back to that no save it for the after show i'm sorry to have triggered you i was very triggered oh my god but i heard it gets good after the first four or five seasons Oh, just a second.

Speaker AI just want to say, I've watched so many shows for you, Merlin.

AlexOh, he hasn't told you to make any shows. No, no, no. It's just been heavily implied. And I just put something on the TV and then we've watched all of Silicon Valley twice. three times i don't know it's a very good show uh but i mean about everything no that was worth it that's a good show oh man like you have how many bosses do you currently have matt and by boss i mean every like every single quote client you have is basically your

boss because then and they all have different oh sorry uh hey new listeners um maddie walks a bunch of broken dogs for their jobby job oh they're so cute they're all very adorable and very broken but every single one of those people has very different expectations of what you should or shouldn't be doing as well as your manager at the office and the like middle the i don't know the

Speaker Abig boy company guy i i don't know what you call him well so in the office we have you know the guy the big the big boy company guy would be the guy who started the company and founded it i think is what you're looking for entrepreneur um and so he is my boss and then there is an office manager who is my boss and then there is like a trainee slash office manager that basically just tells us

our schedules and group texts us all day which but um so those are technically my bosses and i answer to them but yes every client is different um what what does this have to do with getting

Alexthings done i'm just curious how you manage those expectations and what ones you kind of throw out the window because they don't actually matter they don't actually like they're not just who you don't want to be but it's not actually your job i mean client by client basis but you know

Speaker Awe have this app called time to pet and it's got all wait how did i not know this it's called time to pets it is it is called time to pet and uh it it gives you all the information but i think like just talking to the clients getting to know them and you know being human with them they then treat you like a human being because they're trusting you with a member of their furry family so honestly like making a connection with them and then seeing which dogs are trained and which

aren't and that's how I decide to do my job, I guess.

MerlinI don't know if this is noise or potentially useful, but I mean, sometimes, at least for myself, I will use words as a kind of a mental shortcut, even as I know that it means different things to different people. So two of those nouns that we've used a lot in the past, anybody really, especially in the douchebag business world, one is your boss slash manager slash whatever, the person you report to, like there's that person. And we will refer to people like that as our boss. Another term that gets used a lot that is, I guess, useful, but a little slippery.

You'll hear a word like stakeholder, like everybody who has some kind of, they hold a stake in this project, right? And like the trouble is, though, that like I almost want to go with a slightly, I want to say almost more feminine approach to this which is like okay in my world like let's this is sort of almost along the lines of doing the sort of mental sweep but like with people in your life so i think it can sometimes be useful to if you want to reframe that that i find useful it's sometimes

Alexlike yeah yeah you got a boss i keep talking i really gotta pee matt matt it's your show

Merlinokay i got this um so like you got let's say you got a manager you got a boss you got like all these people you get stakeholders but like i think it's also useful to look at and this sounds fancy and i don't mean to sound fancy but like well who in my life is i think okay so so so the extreme way to put this is who in my life have i allowed to have expectations of me that i've agreed to

mostly accommodate, which sounds kind of fuzzy, but I think it's kind of useful. And here's why. It's like, well, okay, everybody likes to make this, not everybody. A lot of people like to make this into, well, yeah, it must be nice. I got, I got this and I got my boss and I got, well, yeah, but you like accepted that job. Like, did somebody put a gun to your head to stay at that company for three years or five years? It's like, yeah, you got a boss. Yeah, you got a manager and you're constantly, one is constantly overwhelmed on all these sides.

But like if, if, and this is not the kind of thing you necessarily want to talk about at the office or at the workplace or in the text thread, but sometimes I think it's useful to do an inventory of who are almost all the people in my life that have an expectation about me and I've allowed to have an expectation about me and that I have at least tacitly agreed to satisfy or accommodate. And I know that sounds fuzzy, but like, I think when we do that,

we get a much more interesting and perhaps clearer picture because I'm, and I realize I sound fancy when I say that, cause it's like, Oh, I get to decide who has expectations of me. Well, yeah, but we kind of all do on some level. And I feel like when we do that, obviously you're going to go, yeah, of course my boss is allowed to call me anytime because I owe them my livelihood. but like any of the folks who whose dog you walk and you you speak in in really kind terms about their their furry family like you care about the dog you care about the owner but like it's i think

sometimes we are reluctant to acknowledge let alone accept how much stuff i'm pivoting a little here how much stuff well you could say people but stuff how much stuff we have made a partial somewhere between, somewhere like a greater, a non-trivial, non-zero amount of commitment to in life. And we allow people, and this is not directed at you, this is directed at everybody. It's like, holy crap, I just realized there's 27 people in my life

who I've allowed to have an expectation of me, an expectation of my work, an expectation of my time, an expectation of my care. I have not done anything to dissuade this person from believing that they might be at the top of my list of priorities on any given day, right? And so like that 27, I'll bet you a lot of people would be surprised how much over three, five, seven people that is. And if we're really being honest and we're being private and keeping this to ourselves, I bet there's a lot more than that. Because if there are people who just parachute in from nowhere,

let's say a new client, a new potential new job, like how many holes, how many ports have you opened in your life that potentially allow people in to claim your time, your attention, and your care. And I think, and again, that's not directed to you, but like that to me, like one problem we run into with words like boss is that like, well, no, I mean, do we have 27 bosses? Well, not really, but we only get to really control the parts that are reflected in how

we decide where that time, attention, and care goes. And I do think that's useful to say, and I'm not even saying like, oh, arbitrarily, I'm going to pick three people who are allowed to have me care about them. But like, you know, I think one way people run into trouble in life, maybe not you, but some people run into trouble in life is they don't know or acknowledge how many people have a claim on their time, attention, and care. And it's like that, what I can say is that the actual number of those things that can exist in the universe, and maybe even if half those people stepped up on the same day, you'd lose your goddamn mind.

You really have to somewhat authoritatively decide who gets to jump to the front of the line, let alone like, who gets to be in the line, let alone jump to the front of the line. And I think that, you know, if you find yourself spread too thin, and it sounds like your system works for you, which is exactly the point. It's just that I know for myself when I'm being honest about those kinds of things, I realize that I am a weaker person than I realize in terms of like who's allowed to have a claim on me. And I think that can be valuable.

Speaker AOh, I'm just very lucky because in the way that it works, because I am a freelancer on contract, my bosses don't expect me to reply to them 24-7. If they text me at midnight, I'm not expected to respond.

MerlinThe people who pay you directly or the dog parents?

Speaker AThey do text me directly. A lot of my clients text me directly. And this is the thing. I work 10 to 6 are my working hours. So if they text me after that, they do not expect me to answer unless they say like it's an emergent walk. And they will say it's emergent. And they will ask, can you do this? They will not expect me to do it. And then honestly with clients, while I was listening to you, I realized that I do give them a lot of my time, but not all of them. The ones that I have like a rapport with and almost like see as friends, like I know that's probably not the best boundary to have.

MerlinMaybe you care a little more about those. They also tip more.

Speaker AYeah, but if they text me throughout the day, I have something like 30 clients at a given time, but there's maybe like five that I give priority to and would answer anytime during the day. So just the way my job is structured, I'm very lucky that I can cap the amount of people that need me at a given time. And I think I do really well with that with work, but not so much with family.

MerlinMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

AlexOh, I just nodded so hard. I mean, I was off. Matthew has an incredible way of dealing with work-life balance, which is something I aspire to. but yeah you you're always like did you text back this sibling or this sibling and I'm like no no not yet do I need to do I really need to and I I know I'm just uh popping and sticking my dick

in here um the the i i i think when uh this is now matchy therapy hour like i hate seeing you um give your time and attention to people who don't deserve it which is yes obviously a judgment that i make and a call that something i tell you all the time but i am kind of still astounded by people who and not just bosses like taking capitalism just out of it the amount that

of assumptions people make about one another i i don't know maybe it's because i was uh i joined the ggd cult i was indoctrinated as a teenager but i mean i don't know like i i have the thing of like Alex is awkward and standoffish, which is absolutely true, but it hasn't really been to my detriment, I think.

That was to say. I mean, I'm the one at brain school. No, no, I'm just, I'm trying to think of something that will make me sound wise.

You have many a wisdom.

MerlinNo, no, I'm sorry. I wasn't fishing for compliments. I just mean in the sense of like, I do think it's, I do think it is important or potentially very important to like respect and value other people's systems that aren't, that aren't, you know, your system. And I can also just say for myself, like, I don't do like real GTV anymore, but I do still find some of, several of the principles of it just incredibly useful on, on many levels. So like, you know, I've said to you before, Alex, like for me, stuff like the next action, the idea of like, what's the next physical action that I need to take on this? Like, but again, that leavened with some honesty is super important. But like, you know, I think that something I suspect drives David a little bit nuts, that is understandable, but I think it's also understandable that it drives him nuts, is people who read the first third of the book, or the first third of the first third of the book, because the book kind of moves in these sort of, not concentric circles, but

If memory serves, it's been a while since I read the actual book, but it starts with this. The first third of the book gives you a pretty good grounding in what it is that's happening here and leads into some of the concepts that become extremely important in this being something that is sustainable as an actual system for stuff. I think perhaps most notoriously, I think it drives David a little bit nuts how many people think they can just skate on doing a weekly review.

Personally, I'm one of those people that I just don't do that anymore. And I think that drives him crazy because the whole point of that is you're going to set aside time every week to go work on that, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But another one is that, and this gets into the tips and tricks problem, is that people who only read long enough to know they get to buy new gear will lose stuff like the importance of what he calls the altitudes. and in some ways you really are not in some ways in a lot of ways you really cut off some of the

most useful stuff in gtd if you stop at what he calls the runway level because it you know so so i don't know if you've gotten to this part yet matt but um david talks about like this idea of like these altitudes so like you have a runway level which is like okay this is the stuff that like is even happening today. Right. And then he goes up through like so many foot view, 10,000, 20,000, you know, all the way up to, as he likes to put it, like why you're on the planet, but like, however that model works for you, I think it's useful to think about like, well, I can learn the tips and tricks that'll help me dig out of this in the next week or so.

I might be able to, you know, go make my folders and get the inbox and do all the things. But like, I feel like it's, it's a pity sometimes. And this again, it's not directed at you, but really at me and others. But it's like, you know, the runway level or the 10,000 foot level, well, maybe one's problem is that that's where we live all the time, never daring to go higher than that. And he says very expressly in a way that I think is really bracing, really invigorating and smart. He says, look, you know, if there's anything on your mind at any of those levels,

that needs to go into the system somewhere. So that could be something vaunted like retirement. that could even be something like vacation next year or, you know, filling out some form, like whatever that is. It's just if we stop at the point of trying to clean off our desk, we're missing a much bigger picture. It isn't until we explore, acknowledge, explore, and interrogate slightly higher altitudes that we may realize that's all bullshit. All that stuff on your desk is such bullshit

and one never realizes it because they are so consumed with trying to, as we say, get organized. Well, as Merlin Mann likes to say, don't never organize anything you should throw away. And how would you know if you haven't gotten high enough up to look down on everything that you're doing and to look for bigger patterns, like what happens in the next five years or how I feel about this obligation that I agreed to a long time ago and have never reexamined. And I think that that's what's so interesting or frustrating in some ways about GTD for people is like, if you've only gotten to the point of like

knowing, oh, this is for me or this is not for me, like I think, and I'm not saying I'm good at it, but would you agree, Alex, that like some of, to me, that's some of the most interesting stuff is the like, is there a next action on retirement? Is there a next action on say no to this invitation? Like, is there a next action on like this stuff that seems impossibly big and in the future, which science tells us are the things we tend to do worst with. Things that are big and in the future, we tend to be most careless about commitment or non-commitment to. And then suddenly,

you know, you're my age going like, oh, retirement would be great. I guess I should have thought of

Alexthat when I was 30, you know, or whatever. I think about retirement literally once a day, only because I know that for my generation, that's going to be an interesting situation.

Merlinwe'll see but to the altitudes though i mean is that does that figure in your interest with this

Alexstuff at all oh i mean absolutely that that is a part of what led to the uh dropping out of normal school and coming back to chicago and going to art school i'm like well okay this works on the five thousand what does he have like five thousand ten thousand twenty thousand whatever i'm like this is great at 5,000 feet, but I will be fucking miserable and I just can't survive.

MerlinRunway is current actions, 10,000 current projects. And these are just, this is just obviously an analogy sort of. 20,000 is areas of responsibility. Such an interesting idea. Then 30,000 one to two year goals, 40,000, et cetera. 50,000 plus, that's your kind of your whole life, right? but you know it's if at any point if you if you make your if you allow yourself to stop at just even areas of responsibility you can get a lot of your day-to-day done by understanding what your areas of responsibility are so like why do we not say what's your job well because this isn't

really about your job it's about the stuff that other people are relying on you to do and that you've committed to doing do you know what all those things are like you it's sometimes it's you do need to like almost like reverse engineer this. Sometimes we may not know what projects we're working on until we know what actions we're confused about. We may not know what our areas of responsibility are if we don't know all of our projects, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It kind of works up and down. You know what I mean? So he says that's an occasionally thing. But I would say if you're doing GTD, that should come up probably once a week.

It's like at each one of these levels, it's sort of like me going like, well, when I'm washing dishes is when I realize other stuff that needs to happen in the kitchen. I rarely set aside three minutes to go, anything I think about kitchen right now? It's like, no, it's like when I'm in it, when I'm power puttering, when I'm doing that stuff, that's the opportunity to like make that connection between the runway of clean this dish up to, wow, we should get nicer dishes or wow, we should really be in a different house because I'm tired

of washing this dishes with my hand. Those are all related and yet they will seem totally unrelated until you start realizing that, as he says, your entire life is important.

AlexOh, that's so good. That's so good. And that's why the seminar is actually way better than the book. Not way better. I believe it's the second half of the book that has all the runway stuff. But yeah, I don't know. I really like the cat.

MerlinHe gets at it a little bit. But yeah, I feel like that's the point. I know in my rereadings in the past, I have dropped off after I want to say the first third because i mainly want to like rev my engines real hard about all the tactical go buy this gear and this label maker and set it up kind of stuff which which is fun and giddy but you know it's you know if you only ever meditated till it wasn't annoying you wouldn't get very far

Alexi mean just in terms of growing up both maddie and i were just so horny for new school supplies because that, no, like, we talked about it, how going to, like, Office Depot was fucking amazing.

MerlinOh, my God, I love it so much. I love folders. I love pencils. I love all of it. Oh, my God, I love it so much.

AlexYou should have 43 of them.

MerlinOkay, this is getting long, and we still have to do an after show. Matt, bring us home. What's the point of it? What are we doing here? What are we learning? What do you have to share with our listeners at this juncture?

Speaker AThat we're learning how to get organized, but not unless you don't want to. was that a good summary maybe pick pick up some post-it notes maybe some bigger post-it notes stick them all around your apartment and live your life conjoined triangles of success

Merlinthey're conjoined yeah the conjoined triangles like you put them up before you've even written on them and you're like that's where the future confusion is gonna go i'm gonna put them everywhere you know paper the waterfront as they say that's the maddie gtd

Speaker AMm-hmm.

254. Human Superfund Site

Show notes

Transcript

254. Human Superfund Site

Show notes

Transcript

0:00

0:15

0:30

0:36

0:43

0:52

0:59

1:29

1:31

1:35

1:38

1:43

1:50

1:55

1:56

1:58

2:01

2:06

2:06

2:07

2:14

2:26

2:29

2:37

2:40

3:16

3:19

3:25

3:29

3:31

3:36

3:37

3:43

3:57

4:17

4:24

4:26

4:27

4:33

4:35

4:39

4:43

4:57

5:05

5:17

5:45

5:47

5:58

6:00

6:04

6:05

6:09

6:22

6:24

6:25

6:27

6:30

6:30

6:59

6:59

7:00

7:00

7:15

7:52

7:57

7:59

8:01

8:34

8:52

8:55

9:16

9:24

9:27

9:29

9:42

9:44

9:49